


and tomorrow there will be the sunrise

by wjjmwmsn5



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS, don't even read the summary if you haven't watched the movie fellas, except it's not canon compliant at all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 05:10:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14687175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wjjmwmsn5/pseuds/wjjmwmsn5
Summary: Peter doesn't catch the spaceship. He doesn't go to space. He goes home, to May, but the outcome is all the same.





	and tomorrow there will be the sunrise

**Author's Note:**

> my tumblr is transpeterparkers uhhhhh pls let me know if you like this or if it made you sad

They were watching everything from the news on the couch. Their hands had been clasped tightly since they turned it on. Peter wondered if Aunt May could feel how close he was to magically growing wings and floating into the sky so he could help in any way he could. 

Mr. Stark’s stupid suit. He had been so close, his webbing had been  _ so close— _ but he fell short. Drifted back down to Earth. He watched as the spaceship floated away and there was nothing he could do. 

He had been shaky and antsy ever since he touched the ground again, Spider-Man in this brand new suit, Spider-Man in the midst of the worst thing to happen to Earth and to the  _ universe,  _ trudging home defeated because he was too young to save the world. Well, no one was too young to  _ miss it _ once it was gone, so who was Mr. Stark to tell him that he couldn’t fight for it? Friendly neighborhood Spider-Man his  _ ass _ —he would be  _ nothing  _ without a neighborhood to protect once Earth was blown to smithereens. 

He made it home and found that Ned had dropped off his backpack. He called him, made sure that he had made it home okay, asked him why the hell he didn’t just stay at May’s house to be safe. When Ned told him, “My parents were worried,” Peter realized that he should have thought of that. A pang of guilt, inching outwards quickly like poison gas, reminded him that they all had people to go home to.

Then he called MJ. She sounded scared. Not even she could hide it in her voice. This was bad. Like, he could imagine the documentary they would make about this on the History Channel bad. He said so to her. Maybe he shouldn’t have. Most of the world didn’t know what was happening like he did. This was just another day to a lot of people, with some added alien threat.

But she let out one of her MJ sighs. The kinds of sighs that she let out when she was talking to Peter or Ned—exasperated but not mean, not annoyed. He wished he could see her face that accompanied the MJ sigh. He wished he could hold tightly to her and Ned and shield them from whatever was coming. 

Shit. It was all so ominous. Like when the music goes silent in horror movies, or in action movies right when the bad guy walks in. Well, the bad guy was marching in slowly, slowly.  _ He’s coming.  _ It seemed to echo in the air across all of the panicked, shaken New York.

May was fretting constantly while he was on the phone with his friends, and when he hung up with MJ, she came into his room and wrapped him up in a hug, before he even set his phone down. He had taken off the metal suit but he was still wearing his regular Spidey suit on underneath. She wrapped him up, superhero and all. 

He had always known that May Parker was the most amazing person in the whole world. But wow. She was braver and stronger than all the Avengers, combined even. If they could bottle up  _ essence of May Parker,  _ the world would be a better place. The bad guy who sent his spaceship down to Earth and stole their wizard—he’d be destroyed instantly. Especially if she glared at him. 

She left his room to give him space to change into comfy shorts and a t-shirt. It was almost like it was movie night. 

And that was when they landed on the couch, eyes glued to the screen, to the coverage, the speculation, the government officials scrambling to keep up with the technically now-illegal activities of the superheroes joining together to prepare against whatever was coming. 

Eventually May said that they needed to eat something. Lunch. No news during lunch. 

Take a break. Stop drifting. Slow down. But he couldn’t do that. 

“Grilled cheese?” she asked, reluctantly dropping his hand as she went into the kitchen. He followed her in there and got out the bread for her, and then he sat down  at the table as she made it for them. “They’re going to figure this out, Peter.”

“I know,” he said, quietly. 

“You look scared.”

His stomach had been nothing but twisting vines of dread, and his mind flitted from possibility to possibility. 

Where was Tony? Was he okay? Had he saved the wizard, or had they gotten the green stone thingy from around his neck? Who was the bad guy? What did he want? 

It wasn’t fair. The end of the world had never seemed fair. People grabbed onto the small edges carved by time out of the side of cliff faces and hoisted themselves up onto solid ground, and still the universe thought that breaking up all this progress, this technology and culture and everything they had—still the universe thought it made sense. His heart ached at the thought of anyone dying. His heart ached at the thought of all who might already have died at this person’s hand. 

They ate grilled cheese on the couch instead of at the table, the TV on the Game Show Network. It was surreal to watch Family Feud when he knew that there were aliens trying to— what? Take over the planet? 

He obsessively checked his phone, even though he  _ knew  _ Tony Stark wasn’t going to text him about the world ending while he was trying to stop it. But he needed to know. Shit, didn’t he realize that it was ripping Peter in two to sit here and pitch in answers for game show questions when he could be out there  _ saving lives?  _ It felt like his bones had all been shifted a little to the right but the rest of his body stayed in place, and he was a little off balance. All his insides were trying to rewire themselves around the new placement of his skeleton. 

If he could just put the suit on, slip out—it would realign everything. One web slung out to the nearest building, a swing through the sky, a person away from danger, and everything would feel less like his body was literally dying to move from the couch. 

But May said, “Skates. It’s definitely skates,” and he was reminded of how fucking strong she was. They both knew that nothing was okay, nothing was as it was supposed to be—what even was  _ as it’s supposed to be  _ for them anymore? What had they made of it all since Uncle Ben? But he couldn’t leave her. Maybe the one person he needed to save today was her. 

None of the answers on the board were skates. 

…

The next day, it seemed like the entire world had suddenly stopped moving. Peter could feel something like there was someone in the hallway, or like everything was about to explode, or like galaxies away, someone he loved had just died. 

His hair stood on end like it had right before the ship came into the atmosphere yesterday on the bus, but this dread that had been stacking up anyway compounded his anxiety. He was drifting through the sky between buildings without webbing, without a string attached to his soul, without an anchor. He was fucking floating but suspended precariously over a pit of hungry alligators. 

“May,” he said, getting up and grabbing his webshooters. Panic filled his chest as he looked around for her because oh fuck,  _ oh shit,  _ what was happening? “May!” 

She came out of the kitchen quickly, hearing the fear in her voice. “What’s wrong? What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, eyes wide and heart racing. “I don’t know.” Like a ton of bricks hitting him, stopping his momentum, he  _ dropped _ , the space where he’d been flying suddenly cavernous, dark and empty and deep. “May, I don’t feel so good.” 

She came toward him, slowly at first, and then suddenly quicker when his legs gave out. He felt like his entire body was made up of stars and they were all going through supernovas at unnatural rates. They were dying, and he was falling away like flakes off of a hurtling comet. He gripped the back of May’s shirt to hold himself to the planet as she pulled him into a hug. What was wrong? Something was wrong, something she could see, something he was  _ feeling.  _

And then he wasn’t holding her shirt anymore. So quickly. He looked down and his hands were falling to the floor. They were fucking falling to the floor, like ash, like someone had burnt him to nothingness. 

“May,” he said, tears in his eyes, his chest moving quickly with heavy, terrified breaths.

“No,” she breathed out, holding him so tightly, and it sounded like a sob or a gasp. 

“I don’t know—”

“No—”

“—what’s going on—”

“No—”

He was dying. Something had happened and he was fucking disintegrating, like the worst possible horror movie, like one he had never even  _ imagined  _ before, not even in nightmares. Right before his eyes, he was disappearing, leaning heavily against May, and his arms were slipping away from him, floating gently to the floor. Like someone had thrown glitter up in the air and now it was drifting, except it wasn’t bright and happy—fuck, it was gray and dusty. Like  _ ash.  _ It was  _ ash.  _

It didn’t feel like anything. It didn’t feel like every atom in him was being ripped apart and all of the pieces of him were being—what? Fucking cremated? In  _ thin air? _

It just felt like May was holding him up now because his legs were weak, and it was only  _ seconds  _ after his hands disappeared, but it felt like years, or maybe centuries. Because how couldn’t it when he was dying like this? Watching himself disappear?

He realized he was crying, and May had one hand around him holding him up and one outstretched, and she was guiding him to the couch, and now she had set him down and he looked up at her face. 

“I don’t want to go.” 

What was left? What was left? He couldn’t even see. It was like nothing existed but May’s face right in front of him, her hand in his hair, carding through, gently, motherly, like she always did when he was sad. When he was scared. And she was crying, crying so much more than he had seen her cry since Ben died, maybe more. Her shoulders were shaking. 

That was all he could see. Her eyes, her form moving with the force of sobs. It was a movie. A death scene. This was how they all went. It was so much more visceral in real life. 

“I love you, I love you”—like a song, like the background of a song somewhere where you didn’t listen, in the grocery store, “I love you, I love you, Peter, Peter, no,  _ no _ —”

“I love you,” he said back, or maybe he didn’t, but he felt like he did, and he was so fucking scared. 

He danced his way into nothingness and what was left of the world was gray and thin, dried like a drought, like a pile of ashes. A trillion hearts seized at once, and all across the universe, floating like stardust in hungry lungs, a trillion people danced in the wind, and Peter with them. And a trillion people chanted, off beat, off tune, out of focus, “No,  _ no _ ,  _ no. _ ” 

And the sun rose. 


End file.
